To hear Derek Ireland tell it, you would think his company, Edinburgh, Scotland-based Standard Life Assurance Company, Europe’s largest mutual life assurer, is the poster child for almost everything having to do with service-oriented architectures. Ireland, application design manager, says Standard Life’s SOA has been developed and honed around the concept of reusability and invokable services since at least the mid-1990s and is at a level of maturity that would make almost any organization jealous. Standard Life, a financial services company with £100 billion under management, can now claim some 40 percent of its primary applications are part of an SOA. However, despite its embrace of SOA, what it still lacks is widespread adoption of Web services—and it doesn’t have any Web service orchestration in place at all.
"Although we are more than aware of them, we are not making great use of Web services," Ireland says. "Much of what we have done over the past five years predates the maturity of Web services standards. We just weren’t in a position to bet the business on them."
Web services orchestration is all about creating true Web services collaboration within the framework of an SOA. The vision is of a much more interoperable world, but despite the advent of specifications and incipient standards, Standard Life is not alone in steering clear of the technology—it’s still on technology’s sharp edge. To be sure, companies including Standard Life are wholeheartedly pursuing SOA and often accomplishing feats of orchestration within their projects. But for the most part, actual WSO specifications, such as BPEL, remain at best peripheral to what’s actually emerging in development projects. Some potential implementers question whether they need WSO despite the biased enthusiasm of vendors and reports from standards groups.
